At the conclusion
of my 2001
conference paper on the vritual economies of massively-multiplayer online games,
I argued that the next generation of MMOGs should consider more tightly closed
economies along with strong enhancements of the abilities of players to control
the politics and and structure of their virtual worlds. In a forthcoming review
essay about the MMOG Star Wars: Galaxies, I describe why I came to the
conclusion that this argument was flatly wrong. MMOGs designed along the basic
deep patterns laid out by their purely textual predecessors, MUDs and MUSHs,
should not try anything particularly exotic with their virtual economies. In
fact, they should seriously consider doing what the current game City of
Heroes has done, which is to eliminate the player economy entirely. MMOG
economies to date are not satisfying as world-simulations and they are not satisfying
as games.

To some extent,
this captures something deeper still about MMOGs. I still share the aspiration
of many to explore and play in a virual world, a MMOG built around narrative,
role-playing, and the simulation of an imaginary universe. But I am now certain
that the conventional form of the MMOG cannot ever achieve this ambition, and
that to even attempt to gesture towards it is to invite disaster.

What is it that
distinguishes any MMOG from any other kind of online game? The genres
fans have endless debates about this issue, but the only essential characteristic
is persistence. When you log off, the game still exists and things happen in
it while youre not playing, and there is a linear temporality to what
happens. Events progress forward in time, and the game remembers or is changed
by the progress of events.

The reason conventional
MMOGs can never be virtual worlds is that they vest persistence in the
wrong unit. The major unit of persistence in a conventional MMOG is the players
character. It is characters who level, who change in powers, who dress differently,
who acquire items, to whom NPCs react differentially based on reputation, and
so on.

If the gameworld
itself changes, its changes are almost all non-persistent. Spawns of monsters
may be depleted, but this is temporary. Buildings may be created, but they are
essentially extensions of characters, not self-generating features of the gameworld
itself. Quests or plotlines, if they exist, exist in massive parallel, as the
repeated private experiences of thousands of charactersthe same NPCs get
rescued, assisted or defeated again and again by players, like a ride at Disneyland.
There are few or no unique eventsany implementation of such is seen (correctly)
as outrageous favoritism and inequity. New plots or quests may appear, but they
appear laboriously, mechanically, through extensive development efforts.

MMOGs can never
be virtual worlds until they abandon the character as the primary unit of persistence.
To be virtual worlds, they have to make the gameworld itself the major unit
of persistence.

This is the dream
of many MMOG players: they beg for gameworlds in which their actions matter,
in which there are events of consequence. Developers promise to pursue this
chimera, but rarely implement anything even approaching the most modest dreams
of players. Sometimes when they do, theyre forced to rescind the promise.
Famously, when the developers of the original Asherons Call allowed
players to try and defend a magical gem from the demon BaelZharon and
the players allied with him, one server managed to organize an effective defense
around the clock. The developers hadnt planned for the possibility of
a divergence in events between serversthe update for the next month had
to be the same on all servers. So they had to step in and force the planned
conclusion to happen. The fullest implementation to date of gameworld consequences,
Shadowbane, suffered so much from technical flaws that it was hard to
assess its other design ideas, but clearly the developers had not thought clearly
about what happens when the design of the gameworlds geography allows
the first guild to grab prime locations to dominate its competition utterly.
The game more or less ends at that point in that theres nothing left to
do, and partly because the action of the game otherwise involves levelling your
characters and acquiring resources for your guild. The alternative, in the player
conflicts of Dark Age of Camelot, is a hard-wired game mechanic that
tends to force everything back to a neutral state of equilibrium over time in
an endless and predictable oscillation.

All of these limitations
have a great deal to do with the fact that characters are where persistence
is vested. By doing so, the conventional MMOG ties itself firmly and irretreviably
to making persistence be about one and one thing only: accumulation.

The character experiences
persistence in all MMOGs as a linear increase in power and often also as a linear
increase in possessions and wealth. The actual curve of this accumulation varies
from game to game, and in MMOGs with economies, the actual distribution of accumulated
wealth across the entire character population will also differ (but usually
demonstrates a very sharp differentiation between the vast majority of have-nots
and a very small minority of haves). Characters do not change between two or
three functionally equivalent states over time in any MMOG: there is no way
to make equivalent states meaningfully different or recognized in a gameworld
that is static. (The one modest exception to this is games which have some kind
of implemented system for character respec, in which characters can trade in
one set of skills or powers for an equivalent set. But even in this instance,
this is on top of accumulative differences.) Accumulations in power and wealth
allows the player to experience a static gameworld in different ways at different
moments in the lifespan of the character, to access new areas or defeat new
antagonists.

Persistence as
accumulation is essentially the root of all MMOG evil. Everything that is unfun,
unfair and repetitive about curent MMOGs comes from this essential design fact.
The primal conflicts between player constitencies that I describe in my Rubicite
Breastplate paper come from this fact. The utterly fubared design and
gameplay of a MMOG like Star Wars: Galaxies comes from this fact. The only player
activities which do not accumulate, like socializing, role-playing and exploration,
are largely non-persistent, meaning they are not recorded by or recognized by
the game. They may be recorded by players outside the game, on web pages and
the like, and occasionally have in-game manifestations, like guild halls (but
even these must be secured by the accumulative activities of characters).

I propose a fundamentally
different root design for vesting persistence in the gameworld and not in the
characters: what I call the narrative-nudge model of gameplay.

1) In a narrative-nudge
(NN) multiplayer game, players control characters who are more or less equivalent
from the moment of their generation and who do not markedly change in relative
power or wealth within the gameworld over time. Characters who are killed
as a result of game activities are dead permanently: the player must select
a new character (who, because characters are non-accumulative, begins at a
point of relative parity with other characters.)

2) The gameworld
is constructed around a massively branching tree of preset narratives
which are associated with present implementations of gameworld conditions.

3) Players use
the actions of their characters to nudge the gameworld towards
different branches of the narrative tree. Once a set threshold point is reached,
the gameworld will at a random moment launch a new narrative branch
and the distinctive gameworld conditions associated with it. Once the gameworld
has moved along a new branch, it cannot return to past narrative junctures.

4) Some of the
branching narratives of an NN-MMOG have a terminus point after which the game
is over and a new version of the same game can begin. At each such
new beginning, the narrative tree is shuffled around by the developers and
given new weights and branching connections. (Developers may choose to add
new narrative branches to help keep the game fresh as well.)

This is all rather
abstract. Let me illustrate with a specific example.

In a hypothetical
fantasy-themed NN-MMOG, one of the major locations with the gameworld is a town
called Shangri-La. At the initial condition A when the game begins,
the town is ruled by a council of wizards. There are four other factions in
town: a thieves guild, a chivalrous order of knights, a sinister cabal
of necromancers, and an association of merchants.

Each faction, including
the ruling wizards, has a set of tasks that define their optimum narrative branch
forward from the initial condition. The wizards are attempting to check the
power of the necromancers and seeking a powerful magical artifact to assist
them in doing so. The thieves are attempting to extort protection fees from
the merchants while reducing the power of the knights. The knights are attempting
to replace the wizards as the ruling elites of the town while chasing the thieves
out of town. The necromancers are raising an army of dead in secret and offering
an alliance to the merchants in return for protecting them from the thieves.
The merchants are trying to make a commercial alliance with a neighboring kingdom
while reducing the influence of the thieves and securing the protection of one
or more of the remaining factions in return for low taxation rates.

Each of the narrative
branches associated with a distinctive faction is preset by the developers.
Each has mini-branches which do not change the overall gameworld
condition but do change the developmental path of each major branch. So the
merchants, for example, might move towards closer alliance with the necromancers
or towards alliance with the knights or wizards: their narrative branch would
allow for both developments, both would advance the merchants' storyline.

Each branch would
move towards a tipping point based both on the incremental actions
of players and non-player characters and on preset major events
whose resolution would move a particular branch more rapidly towards a tipping
point.

So for example,
every day in the gameworld, necromancer NPCs might be found in the citys
graveyard, attempting to procure zombies. If players intervene by attacking
and defeating the necromancers, that faction would receive no points for that
days gameplay towards their army of the dead objective. If
players instead actively assisted the necromancers, and raised zombies themselves,
the necromancers would receive extra points towards their objective.

Major events
would be a part of each preset narrative, programmed in advance by the developers.
If, say, it takes 1000 points for the necromancers to hit the tipping
point in their objective, past which the gameworld might at any time randomly
initiate the next major branch in the narrative, at condition B,
when the necromancers have 300 points, players might begin to receive hints
or indications that a major battle between the knights and the necromancers
is brewing that evening. That battle would occur at a random time between 6pm
and 2am on the gameworld clock; if the necromancers win, their narrative would
receive 100 further points towards its advancement.

Once a tipping
point is reached, a new condition can launch randomly after a daily maintenance
shutdown. When it does, the entire gameworld moves forward permanently onto
a new branching point, with new conditions: it can never be returned to the
point before the branching occurred. So, for example, if the necromancers are
first to their tipping point, the next morning, the players might
log on to find that the wizards council has fled the town to a set of distant
caves, the knights have been defeated and imprisoned or executed, the merchants
have struck a deal with the necromancers, and the thieves have promised their
support as well. Players might wander through the city and find that the Army
of the Dead patrols the town. Some businesses might be gone, and others appear
in their place. And so on. Now a new preset selection of different branches
might appear. The necromancer faction would now splinter into two competing
groups vying for power over the other. The merchants would now have two factions,
one of which has second thoughts and seeks to locate the hidden wizard refugees
for an alliance. A new rebel faction might appear of citizens who want the Dead
gone from their town.

The only persistence
that would vest strongly in the characters would be accumulative points indicating
their relations to particular factions, based on their past deeds. So a character
at the initial condition A might work consistently to advance the fortunes of
the knights. Each time that character succeeds, he would gain a point of knight
alliance. The more such points, the more a character would see of the
inner workings of a particular branch of the narrative. A character
with no strong leanings might be able to assist in incremental gains for any
given alliance during a particular game session. The necromancers will take
any help offered in their nightly excursions into the graveyard. The thieves
will take any help offered in stealing from the merchants. But with no strong
leanings, a player will not be invited to participate on the side of one faction
during major preset events.

After a major shift
to a new narrative branch, a character may find that he is now at a serious
disadvantage. After the necromancer victory, a strongly knight-associated character
may now find that he is attacked every time he appears publically in the city.
The player could decide at this point to give up the character and start a new
characterknowing that he loses nothing except his knight affiliationor
he might decide to make a heroic attempt to stay alive all through the next
branching, fighting for a lost cause. Perhaps this character will try to lose
knight affiliation quickly by working for the merchantsaffiliation points
degrade slowly over time if not actively renewed.

An NN-MMOG would
have some very serious design difficulties to overcome.

First, the effort
of designing and programming what would have to be a very, very extensive and
wide-ranging series of narrative branches would be enormous, easily equalling
or surpassing the challenge that game content poses for a conventional MMOG.
(On the other hand, eliminating the endless managerial nightmares posed by conventionally
accumulative character-based persistence like levelling or loot would save labor,
as well). The challenge isn't just a labor-time issue: it's a theoretical one.
The evident comparison here is to the authorial problems and issues that hyperfiction
has faced. I don't think I'm alone in finding that virtually all works of hyperfiction
disappoint both in the number and type of branching explorations they allow.
Every branch poses the question of its own limitations. The more expansive and
imaginatively branching a work of hyperfiction or ergodic literature is, the
more the reader asks why he should be limited to the choices provided. The more
an author seems to cede control of the narrative, the more that an author's
control is felt as an inimical presence.

Second, an NN-MMOG
would face a problem very similar to that posed by quests and puzzles in a conventional
MMOG. Conventional quests are very rarely solved through ordinary
gameplay in a MMOG, no matter how cleverly designed they are. A very small group
of powerlevellers, sometimes with covert help from developers, typically figures
out how a quest is done, and then leaks or openly disseminates that information
the vast bulk of the players. In some cases, players actively reverse engineer
these solutions by hacking the game: the monthly updates of Asherons Call
were usually figured out in their entirety by players who hacked the portal.dat
file the moment the update went live. An NN-MMOG would face this issue in two
ways. First, players who gained advance knowledge in some fashion of the particular
future events of a given branch would possess an enormous advantage
in terms of influencing the game in particular directions or predicting surprise
twists in the plot. If there were multiple servers, if one server
was temporally ahead of the others, players on all servers would
very rapidly have the surprise of the unfolding story spoiled for them. In any
event, as a much more content-driven type of MMOG, an NN-MMOG would also have
to deal with the extraordinary speed that dedicated players can rip through
content. How many branches would be needed in order to make a given iteration
of the game last, and contain some sense of surprise for the players? How to
keep the content relatively secret or veiled from the players?

Third, and related
to the second point, the competitive dimension of the game would consist largely
in terms of the coordination of group effort towards particular plots and in
the intuitive grasping of where the highest return of active investment
towards plot or gameworld events might be. The more that the underlying structure
of the plots were known, or the relationship between activities and plot motion
was understood, the more that players might exchange one kind of character-driven
grind for another kind of plot-driven one instead.

Fourth, characters
would still need to be able to act diffentially in the world, and if they were
all perfectly identical, much of the immersive character of the game would be
strongly and negatively affected. But if non-accumulative character designs
differed significantly in their relative combat power or ability to influence
the course of events in other ways, players might rapidly converge on a single
best type of character. It would be important to allow players multiple
specialized avenues for interacting with the games narratives and to try
and balance those opportunities. (i.e., the nightmare of competitive balance
would not go away, it would just be vested elsewhere). Part of the "fun"
of playing in a virtual world is to choose the right tool for the right job,
and to feel rewarded when you have done something particularly creative or efficient
in that respect.

It goes without
saying that this would be a boutique design, appealing to a subset of the current
MMOG audience.

There are other
ways to come at the same goals, but the fundamental shift that I think has to
take place if we want to have virtual worlds is to stop making individual characters
the main unit of persistence. Alternative strategies I can think of might be
to make groups or guilds the main changing but persistent feature of the game;
another might be to make NPCs the main thing that players would try to influence
or change.

If all we want
is games with no world component, no sense of world simulation, then I might
suggest that developers would be wise to stick to the design philosophy of City
of Heroes: a no-frills, combat-oriented design that is essentially a first-person
shooter with persistent statistics. Theres nothing wrong with that: I
like City of Heroes quite a lot, and play it regularly. But its
not and will never be a virtual world. Nor will any MMOG which starts from the
design foundations that all MMOGs to date have adopted.